May We Meet Again
by The Loud Guy
Summary: The battle is over, and Fi is at rest, having reached the end of her long journey. But not all of her work has been done, and not all of her goodbyes have been said.


"May we meet again in another life..."

These were the words she said to her master's back as he walked out of the chamber where rested the sword that was her vessel. She had told him that she had begun to fade; that her thoughts were sinking into nothingness; that she was drifting into a sleep from which she would not wake; that, without using the words, she was dying. This was true. Her purpose fulfilled, she began to unravel, finding her last reward in the peace of oblivion. A matter of moments stretched between her last words and the last flicker of her consciousness, so that by the time her master stepped fully from the chamber there was nothing left of her.

But that was more time than she had lead him to believe.

Forged outside of time, no longer anchored to corporeal reality, she sank back into her thoughts, and the future grew distant, quiet. It came, it would never fail to arrive, but it was _slow_ , unbelievably slow to those whose consciousness was married only to the aging of flesh, the passing of days. The vast multitudes contained in her mind were a fortress of secrets, and it was into this last place that she retreated, waiting to pass from the world.

The room of her mind was white, the background of her interior universe a thing of molten light, but knowledge ran in steel-blue rivulets that twisted and turned back into each other, tracing out lines of logic and possibility that would have seemed fractal to the eye. The effect was similar to standing inside of an enormous blue cube, covered in patterns more intricate than the ripples of a billion raindrops crossing over each other. All the memories the Goddess had given to her coursed in those streams, and she watched as the first of them winked out. The blue broke, the knowledge fading, and a sliver of white radiance shone through. This was the form of her death, ego-death, true-death, and on some level she thought that she might stay and watch until the degeneration was so pronounced that she lost the ability to understand.

But no. There was work to be done, still.

In the very heart of her mind there stood a blue crystal, and in the heart of this crystal there burned a purple fire. The crystal was not literal, merely a visualization of the confines of the Master Sword, but as she understood it the fire was much closer to an accurate representation of the cleansing power. She floated to the crystal, flitted around it, inspecting it, making sure there was no flaw there.

And, as she had expected, no flaw existed. Her mistress's handiwork, tempered in her master's effort and blood, was utterly peerless. To be so attached to a power like this, so instrumental to so great a work, was a source of what she had begun to identify as pleasure (that pleasure was tinged by something else, something she did not yet have a name for, and that feeling intensified as she realized she had only found pleasure at the end of her life). The craftsmanship was exquisite, the heart of the sword's power impermeable save to herself, she who had held the fire.

And the fire inside burned bright and cold. The flames licked at the interior of the crystal, agitating a black mist that grew thinner, almost infinitesimally thinner, with every curl of divine power. The soul of Demise would take a vast amount of time to be completely eradicated—millions of times longer than she had to live—but eradicated it would be, and that great evil would never see the outside world again. Turning her awareness fully into this place, she could feel the shreds of the demon king as they burned. Because she wished to, she began to measure the rate of decay. It was simple enough: she took the entirety of Demise's soul as a measurement, waited for a space between moments, and then measured again.

She stopped. A flaw in the numbers, in the measurement. Was she already losing her faculties? No. Not yet, not quite yet. So she measured again. Waited. Measured. Waited. Measured.

 _The rate of attrition is declining,_ thought she, so used to the fact of conscious thought that she gave voice to her astonishment, her doubt. _The degree of decline is within the margin of error for observational awareness... but there is no margin here, in this place. The Master Sword is flawless. No, discard that. There is always the possibility of error, and error in this case would be catastrophic._

That thought in her mind, she considered the most likely explanations for what was happening, and as she thought the blue walls around her shone with a light brighter than the sun of the exterior world. Many thousands of possibilities presented themselves, but she parsed them down to two essential likelihoods, one of which did not have a solution and one of which might: the first likelihood was that her own faculties were degenerating to the point that she would not be able to measure with a necessary degree of accuracy. If this was ultimately the case, she would pass into oblivion completely unsure of it. This scenario would be impossible to act on.

The second likelihood was that the sample being measured, Demise's soul, was tainted by another substance.

Neither possibility was more or less likely than the other; one was impossible to act upon; acting on the other would not affect the first. So her decision was made.

Her power here was limited; she could not remove Demise's soul from the crucible in which it was being burned. That limitation excepted, she could interact with the power of the Master Sword however she wished. So she reached into the crystal with what power she had, filtering the black mist. It slid off of her, unable to affect her consciousness—but something clung to her, something that was _not_ Demise. This substance was black, and gritty, and at a base level it was very nearly crystalline, while Demise's soul was little more than mist.

So the foreign substance she extricated, pulling it free of the crystal. Demise's soul lunged in the wake of her drawing it out, as if to escape, but only slammed up against the interior of its prison. She turned away from it, considering what she had removed, turning the now-vibrating crystalline dust over and over in her thoughts.

Then it _flinched_ , and she felt something familiar in it, an echo of a presence she knew.

In one motion she flung the gritty black substance high, spreading it throughout the empty space between her thoughts, and she waited. She was dying; nothing could affect Demise's prison or his execution; her curiosity in that moment outweighed her sense of self-preservation.

And, for what seemed a long time, nothing happened. The black crystals floated as if suspended, but did not seem to behave any differently in the open air than they had in the flame.

Then they winked out of existence. She waited.

A pressure on the interior of her thoughts, an impression of black and gold diamonds sketched on the background of her mind. There and gone, there and gone, winking in and out of being like the contracting and relaxing of a heart, and every time they appeared it was more insistently, with more pressure. There and gone, there and gone, there and...

A split in the air (air? there was no air here) and a pulse of strength, and a new presence stood in the fortress of Fi's thoughts. Tall, skin like burnished iron inlaid with lighter hues in the shape of diamonds, criss-crossed with white lines in repeating mystic patterns that sketched the shapes of diamonds on the outside of his shoulders, the figure idly fingered the enormous gap on his chest where his dark grey gem used to sit.

"Ghirahim," she said.

He looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time, and his eyes widened very slightly. "The brat's sword." Suddenly conscious of being observed, he ceased prodding at the gap where his gem had been ensconced, looked about himself. "Where are we?"

"We are... in my thoughts." She looked around, and on some level what she saw troubled her: everything was more concrete, sharper, more _physical_ , as if this was a reality instead of a visualization. "The environment was less tangible before you manifested. I theorize that your ego is pushing our shared perception toward a more—"

He winked out of existence in a flash of white and black diamonds, reappeared on the other side of the room, near one of the blue walls. "Fascinating. Really, genuinely fascinating." He teleported again, and she knew where he would reappear before he did. "You know, I assumed you didn't have a thought in your head, but this is some really extraordinary work. Amazingly crafted." Again he teleported, and she considered that she might be able to prevent him from doing that, then discarded the idea. There was no harm. When he reappeared her was bent forward at the waist, hands on his hips, peering close at one of the cracks in the wall, at the brilliant white light that shone through here. "Hmmm, what's this? A fracture—and not a stress fracture, I don't think. No, this is..." He stopped, straightened, teleported, was standing right in front of her, would have been looking down at her if she wasn't hovering half a meter off of the ground.

She thought he would ask about the degradation; he did not.

"How did I get here?"

"You were sundered when Demise was defeated." He took a step back, as if she had kicked him in the face. "When Demise could no longer maintain his corporeal form, his essence was absorbed into the Master Sword. There is a better than 99% chance that you were simply swept up in the vacuum that consumed the demon king." She gave him a moment; others usually needed time to process these ideas. He turned, looked to the crystal where the roiling form of Demise's soul danced over the flames of the old gods. "When measuring the rate at which Demise's soul was being destroyed, I noticed an anomaly. That anomaly was you."

He looked back at her, shock still plain on his face. How strange, to be able to see that, to identify it, when she would not have been able to do that a few weeks ago. "You... removed me, then. Did you...?"

"The likelihood that the impurity was you was impossible to calculate. If you _were_ the impurity, the likelihood that you would be able to reconstitute yourself was so small as to be infinitesimal." That he was present at all was almost unbelievable; if not observing it herself, she would have assumed it to be effectively impossible. "That you are here, now, in this shape, speaks to an incalculable power of will."

"Well, I have been called stubborn before." But he was distracted from the answer, his normal candor and bluster having fallen away. He touched the spot where his gem had been, the motion very deliberate. "You're right. I'm on the edge of dissolving, having to hold myself together from moment to moment. Keeping myself in one piece is taking all the strength I have, and it's not something I can keep up for long." He said this and then set his jaw, and she could hear his teeth grinding—and his body shimmered, as if it were about to burst. It settled after a moment, but it was plain that his existence in that shape was very tenuous. "But something is wrong with you, too. Some kind of degeneration, it looks like." He looked at the gap in the wall that he had been eyeing before, and it was wider. "Progressive. Not accelerating, I don't think, but you're not going to be around for very long either. Were you damaged in the battle?"

"The Master Sword was completely unharmed," and she felt some thrill of pride at that. That was new, too, but she could recognize it. "What is happening to me is the final part of the Goddess Hylia's plan for me; my purpose fulfilled, I am no longer needed to guard the sword. Instead of waiting alone for the next hero, across a period of time that may constitute thousands of years, I will die."

"You are being discarded," he said, his voice low and unhappy. "A tool with no more purpose."

"No living thing persists forever, Ghirahim." These words came to her as she thought of them, tumbling out in a stream, ideas that she had never considered before speaking them. "That I die now, that I be _allowed_ to die, is not a statement about the worth of my life. It is the surest proof that I am alive."

"It isn't proof of anything!" There, his rage, bubbling up the surface, his body contorting as he gripped at his own skull, teleported—then reappeared in the same spot, but his hands were on her face, cupping her jaw. "It's just proof that you're going to die, when you don't _have_ to! What right does the goddess have to destroy you, or anything? What is the validity of her dominion?"

"That is Demise's argument."

"Of course it is. It was _always_ my master's argument, that dominion should be a function of strength and not of origin, that no one should have their fates decided for them simply because of how they were made! What good that the goddess discards you this way? Beautiful things should not be _made_ to die!"

He was projecting, railing against his fate and the end of his own life, or she thought he was, and then she realized she did not really know him. She knew what the goddess had taught her about him, but all of that information was just what was necessary to defeat him. She knew he was brash, and vain, and proud almost beyond reason, and that in every moment he was a creature of his passions so that when he acted it was with at least some degree of sincerity. She could not know if he was outraged on her behalf or his own. She could not know, and so could not argue.

So, "And yet the truth is that I am dying."

He released her face, hissing between his teeth. He teleported, and she watched him as he reappeared next to the crystal, staring at his master's soul. This he did for only a minute before teleporting again, and now he was seated on the ground in front of her. "We are alike in that, then." He looked up at her, and he was smiling, and it was a wry and predatory thing. "Maybe in a few other ways."

She was tired, she realized, fatigued in a way that she had never experienced before. She settled onto the floor herself, folding her legs beneath her body, and white light broke through the blue of the room of her thoughts. Seated across from him, seeing him in his true shape, seeing him as a creature of passions, she was able to see what he meant. May have meant. It didn't matter. "There are other ways, yes. I have begun to experience emotions analogous to those felt by humans, in the past few weeks. I have wondered if, given time, I might experience them as strongly as you do. I find the idea... unlikely. But I will not be able to test it."

He waved his hand. "Of course you would. I changed a very great deal in the thousands of years I spent working to resurrect my master. We would not be the same, by any means, but the feelings you experience would become sharper, clearer." He looked at her, considering what he said. "Less so for you than for me, I think. Partially because of your environment, mostly because that is how you are built." He was quiet for a moment, craning his head one way, then the other, his eyes tracing a long path over her face and body and then face again. "What are you feeling right now?"

"Tired," she said. "I have never experienced fatigue before. It is as if I have been cut off from the source of my own vitality, and without it I am beginning to wither."

"A flower without sunlight."

"An overly poetic image." She turned it over in her mind. "But not inapt."

She found herself lying on the ground, but did not remember coming to rest there. Had she fallen? Ghirahim was watching her, still, and his expression had not changed.

"You are feeling something else," he said. "Something that's also very new to you, I should think."

"How do you know?" she asked, not to argue but because he was right and that made her curious.

"Given time, one can read others very easily. Will you tell me what you're feeling?"

She nodded, tried to separate herself from the feeling, found she could not. It was all around her, affecting the texture of her existence, and she could not step away from it to analyze or measure it. How could one speak surely about something to which one was so near that it was entangled with the self? But she had agreed, and so she tried.

"Context is required to communicate this. My existence as a conscious being has been short. I remember the moment when I awoke, and every subsequent moment I have ever experienced. When I traveled with my master, I knew that there was a time in which I had not existed, but the immediacy of our work meant that I did not reflect on this fact. Now," she stopped for a moment. That was a new thing too, having to think over her words _after_ she had begun speaking. "Now I am dying, and the prospect of no longer existing consumes me."

A high, clean tone as he teleported, and now he was sitting by her, not looking down at her. He was watching the walls.

"You're afraid," he said, very gently.

"Yes." It was true. It was not an immediate fear, a fear that might activate a fight-or-flight response in a creature of flesh and blood; it felt larger than that, too large to confront, as if there could be no struggle and no retreat. Because of course there couldn't be. "I am afraid of dying, now that it is upon me. This my last reward, the rest that has been gifted to me by Her Grace the goddess Hylia, and I am afraid of it. That feels wrong, but it is true."

"It's not wrong." He still wouldn't look at her.

"Perhaps not. Perhaps there is not an inherent validity or invalidity to emotional responses. But the truth remains that I am afraid. I have been with my master at all times during which I was conscious, and grew close to him in that time, understanding the world according to how he interacted with it. Now, without his company or the company of those he cared about, there feels like there is a... gap. I do not know what else to call it." Was it wrong to say that, with him there? To exclude him, even though he was her enemy? They were not enemies any more; reduced as they were, their prior relationship was not really important.

"I have been alone for a long time," he said. "But it makes little difference. I have experienced death, or near to it, and I am not afraid."

"The fortitude that you have is beyond me as I am now." She stared at the ceiling, at the cracks of white spreading slowly there. The world was softer again, her awareness itself less concrete. "Ghirahim."

"Hm?"

"We were foes, but I do not think of you as my enemy now." Now he looked at her. "Is that strange? That our relationship to one another is simply a product of our circumstances, and not necessarily who we are?"

He thought about it, and thought about it, and thought for so long that Fi thought he would not answer, but in the end he did. "No. That is not strange. Based on my observations, that is simply the way of things."

"It is good that you concur." The fatigue was a weight on her chest. She did not think she would be able to talk for much longer. "I am sorry that you had to end like this, with me. If I could choose for you, I would have you be free in your last moments." He said nothing, kept looking at her, and she could no longer read his expression, as if it had become too subtle for her to understand. "In another sense, though, I am glad that you are here. I am glad that I am not alone." Saying that formed a connection, and she looked up at him from the floor. "Ghirahim. I know that simply being here is a matter of tremendous effort, and that you can let go of your tether to this life and be at rest."

She didn't finish, found she could not. Why couldn't she? There was a pressure on her thoughts again, and she didn't recognize it for what it was.

He reached over, brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. "Ask."

"Will you stay with me, until it is over?"

"Yes." He put that same hand on her shoulder, and his grip was firm. "Of course."

So he did. They were there, in the quiet of that room, for the long time that it took for the whiteness in the walls to split the blue, to fragment it, to swallow up the calmness of knowledge with the radiance of oblivion. The fire burned in the center of the room, contained in the crystal, and that did not change. Her awareness slipped, and slipped, and faded, but he was next to her, his hand on her shoulder and his grip so strong that she always felt him there.

In the end, at the last moment, she found that she was not afraid.

"Thank you."

Then she was gone.

Then he was gone.

All that remained was a crystal, in which burned a fire, above which writhed a slowly dissipating mist.

The heart of the sword was bright, and clean, and silent.


End file.
